The fight for women’s rights in the Muslim
majority world has a long history. The idea of Islamic feminism as part of this
struggle is of more recent provenance and probably dates back to the
1980s.Since that time many Muslim scholars, particularly women, have attempted
to dislodge the firmly entrenched male epistemic privilege on the basis of developing their own
interpretations of the Qur’an and
Sunna/hadith as well as the larger Islamic
tradition ( turath) as they realised, especially in the post-revolutionary
Iranian context, that women’s rights
cannot be secured in the long run unless they are systematically justified in
religious terms.

In my article
Toward
a Scriptural Hermeneutic of Islamic Feminism that was published in late
2015 in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion I outline a number of
mechanisms pertaining to Islamic scriptural hermeneutics that are afﬁrmative of
the very concept and goals of Islamic feminism as a practice ground in scriptural reasoning. After a brief summary of the existing
scholarship on the topic in the article
I not only attempt to identify and discusses the delineating features of
Islamic feminist scriptural hermeneutics but also how exactly they support the
ideas underpinning Islamic feminist thought.

The identified hermeneutical principles as
the basis for Islamic feminist scriptural hermeneutics include the following:

1.an interpreter-centered
hermeneutics;

2.a comprehensive
contextualization approach to textual sources;

3. a thematico-holistic approach to textual
sources and the dialogical nature of the Qur’anic discourse;

4.a non-salafi-based
worldview/epistemology;

5.an ethico-religious values and
purposive-based interpretation

6.a non-hadith dependent Sunna
hermeneutics

In what follows I
will briefly explain how each of these hermeneutical principles supports the
project of Islamic feminist hermeneutics.

The hermeneutical recognition that
interpreters and their various subjectivities (e. g. subscription to a
patriarchal worldview) play an important role in the process of interpretation
and creation of meaning (rather than simply objective extrapolation from texts)
that can be gleaned from contemporary literary theories such as that of a
reader response theory can, at least, in part account for the patriarchal bias
in (neo)- classical Islamic hermeneutics ( both exegetical and legal ). In
addition the recognition of meaning as always tentative and biased allows
contemporary proponents of Islamic feminism to develop and defend the viability
of non-patriarchal interpretations.

A comprehensive contextualisation to
textual sources including the Qur’an and the hadith ( a feature that is
warranted on the basis of recognising their essentially dialogical and oral
nature) are premised on the idea that
the socio-legal injunctions featuring in these sources ( e.g. those pertaining
to divorce ,inheritance, the hudud etc.) in essence in many ways reflected
those of the pre-Qur’anic context and are therefore customary 9’urfi) and not
immutable ( ta’budi) in nature. Thus, for interpretational purposes they are
only procedural in nature and were not meant to institute absolute rules and regulations
and are to be interpreted in the context of the overall spirit and objectives
(maqasid) of the Qur’an and Sunna such as contextually sensitive concepts of
justice and fairness (we shall turn to this point below) that are discovered on
the basis of a thematico-holistic approach. Classical Islamic law fell well
short of this approach and adopted at best a semi-contextualist hermeneutic.
Comprehensive contextualisation for the purposes of the Islamic feminist
project, therefore, permits a hermeneutical departure from the classical
Islamic laws on gender and opens up alternative and more gender just interpretations.

A salafi worldview/epistemology is based on
a hermeneutical mechanism central classical Islamic law which at least, in
theory, a priori privileges the interpretive
efforts of the early Muslim communities (especially the distinguished
Companions and the Successors) over all others. When combined with the other
mechanisms explained above a salafi worldview/epistemology implies a
subscription to an epistemologically pre-modern episteme that lacks internal
hermeneutical mechanisms to incorporate ethical values and system of ethics
that were not prevalent at the time of the formative and classical periods of
Islamic thought into its ethical and legal canon. The entire edifice of this
traditional/classical/pre-modern Islamic law, legal theory and ethics was based
on an Aristotelian, ethical voluntarist-based system of ethics. This system of
ethics awarded women an ontologically, ethically, legally, religiously,
socially, and politically inferior status vis-à-vis men. When combined with the
above discussed hermeneutical tendencies inherent to classical Islamic
tradition this salafi worldview , considers
this ethical system to be reflective of Divine Will and as such the most just
system there could ever be.

A non-salafi based worldview/epistemology,
in turn, is premised on the rejection of this worldview/epistemology and theory
of ethics on the basis of an ethically objectivist, post-Aristotelian system of
ethics and a progressive (in the sense of possibility of change) worldview,
informed by contemporary discussions on gender justice and equality considered
to be embodying the spirit and values of the Qur’an and Sunna.Therefore in
the article
I argue that an adoption of such a worldview and system of ethics as a
theoretical lens through which the Qur’an and Sunna are interpreted would
enable the Islamic feminist hermeneutics project to account for the patriarchal
nature of the traditional Islamic hermeneutics as well as develop non-patriarchal
interpretations of the same.

An ethico-religious values and purposive
based (maqasid) approach arises from the previous four discussed hermeneutical
mechanisms. It is akin to Gadamer’s concept of teleological hermeneutics in
which the text is interpreted in terms of the world it projects to the
interpreter. This hermeneutic stipulates that the intended meaning of the text embodies
or approximates the spirit or the purpose of the text better than the literal
meaning itself. While this approach is to some extent present in the turath its
hermeneutical significance is greatly reduced as it identifies the maqasid
within the confines of a largely textualist and ethically subjectivist
interpretational matrix of classical Islamic law outline above. As I argue in the
article an Islamic feminist hermeneutics project would benefit from
teleological hermeneutics as it would provide arguments based on scriptural
reasoning for a purposive and ethico-religious-values-based hermeneutic whose
values are based on contemporary ethically objectivist derived values such as
gender justice and equality and not the salafi-worldview-embedded, pre-modern
ones.

Finally, I argue that a concept of Sunna
that is conceptually, epistemologically, hermeneutically and methodologically
distinguished from that of a ‘sahih’ hadith and interpreted in line with the
other hermeneutical mechanisms explained above is another important
hermeneutical tool for the project of Islamic feminism. This is so because it
permits the proponents of Islamic feminism project to simultaneously embrace
the concept of Sunna ( as a dynamic and meta-textual concept/practice) and yet reject many patriarchal and
misogynist ‘sahih’ hadith that classical Islamic tradition considers as having probative
value.

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About Me

Adis Duderija is currently a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the University Malaya, Gender Studies. He received his Ph. D in 2010 from the University of Western Australia. He is the author of Constructing Religiously Ideal ‘Believer’ and ‘Muslim Woman’ Concepts: Neo-Traditional Salafi and Progressive Muslim Methods of Interpretation (Manahij), Palgrave, 2011. His other publications can be found on the tabs above.